Archive for the ‘Youtube’ Category

It’s been a while since I posted here and I’ve tossed around many an idea for posting. Instead of something political or ranting about this or that, I thought I’d do something that would help others instead. It’s something that everyone likes too. Matter of fact, everyone has their own collection that often gets larger and larger over the years.

Many have used iTunes and other services to purchase their digital music. Many share their music via Youtube. Even the record companies or at least someone inside the companies is sharing various music online via Youtube. How do I know this. I’ve discovered this while working on a project to provide entertainment for my 40th high school class reunion.

What I found would not only increase your music collection but save you a ton of money as well. With a few simple tools (some free and others that cost you a small amount should you decide to use a “professional” version of the software), some time, and a little effort on your part, most of your music can be had for free without the use of bit torrent or other so called illegal services.

Let’s start with the appropriate software. Most use Microsoft Windows so I’ll provide a link which talks of many different Youtube downloading tools. That link is:

This one talks of pros and cons of the various software as well as what you’d get with the “paid for professional” versions. I’ll leave the decision up to you as to the software you choose as a Windows user when it comes to downloading the videos from Youtube.

For my Mac fans you can look and select from this link for downloaders:

While researching this I found that Clipgrab is available for both Windows and Mac as well as Linux. Give it a try. It allows multiple downloads (more than one at a time), it has a converter ( I don’t use this function), and a very handy function I’ve found to work with the browser. Just right click on the URL in your browser for the video and it can copy the URL directly to Clipgrab with a simple click on the notification. Then you can download it with Clipgrab. Best of all is Clipgrab is free. So all operating systems have multiple applications for downloading Youtube video. The choice is yours.

The second application you’ll need is Audacity. It’s an open source (free) application that has Windows, Mac, and in my case Linux versions. This is a “go to” tool for converting videos to MP3 and allowing you to edit the content, normalize it, as well as many other things with audio. You’ll find that some of your Youtube downloaders will have converters built into them. Audacity will do a much better job and you can clean up the recorded song as well. Documentation on this application is very good and straight forward in it’s use. You can find Audacity here:

Now the fun really begins. Start searching Youtube for music videos. The best ones to select are those that state “Provided to YouTube by.” After this statement it will most likely have a record company name such as Universal, Sony, etc. If these are NOT available, there are often posts of the original video done for MTV or VH1 posted by Vevo. These are the best to download for conversion. When they are NOT available, your best bet is consult one of two sources for time length to get the correct length of the song in question. Those sources can be:

Those sites will allow you to search the artist, the album, and the song to verify you have a good download from Youtube.

Once you have the video or videos you want to convert to MP3 format, you’re ready for the second phase of things unless your downloader will also convert to MP3. I forgo the built in converters because I remove dead spots (no audio) as well as normalize the sound and select the bit rate and quality of the conversion. These are things that Audacity does with aplomb.

With that mentioned, load up Audacity then open your video file with it (most Youtube video formats are supported). Once the file is open you can edit it to your hearts content. Please read the documentation on the editing tools before using them. After you’ve finished with your editing, you’ll have to EXPORT instead of SAVE for MP3 format. This is very well described in the Audacity documentation. This is where you’ll select name, bit rate, quality, and be able to edit the MP3 tag file.

That’s pretty much how to do it. I hope this helps those that collect music as I’m now doing for myself and the entertainment of others. And one last thing. Wikipedia is your friend when it comes to the charts. There are various pages on the various Billboard charts. One such that I’m using has listed all the Billboard Hot 100 year end songs from 1951 to present. There’s another such listing the Billboard Country year end songs from 1941 to present. I’m sure there are other charts there or you could even look at Billboard’s own: